Patent Pending
The author of Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, and Imperial Earth certainly needs no introduction. However, Clarke’s excellence as a novelist has tended to obscure his skill as a master of the short story. Future critics and historians of science fiction may indeed discuss Clarke for his contributions to the short story rather than the quality of his longer work. In “Patent Pending” he addresses himself to one of the truisms of economic life-if you outlaw the product, you increase the demand (or certainly the price). In the United States, the experience of Prohibition and, more recently, legalities over marijuana have supplied us with considerable evidence in this regard, as have the books banned in Boston or any other number of examples. In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke projected a future that included Pan American and Howard Johnsons. Here Clarke portrays a business opportunity of the future that promises great rewards, but which carries with it certain risks.
There are no subjects that have not been discussed, at some time or other, in the saloon bar of the White Hart-and whether or not there are ladies present makes no difference whatsoever. After all, they came in at their own risk. Three of them, now I come to think of it, have eventually gone out again with husbands. So perhaps the risk isn’t on their side at all . . . .
I mention this because I would not like you to think that all our conversations are highly erudite and scientific, and our activities purely cerebral. Though chess is rampant, darts and shove-ha’penny also flourish. The Times Literary Supplement, the Saturday Review, the New Statesman and the Atlantic Monthly may be brought in by some of the customers, but the same people are quite likely to leave with the latest issue of Staggering Stories of Pseudoscience.
A great deal of business also goes on in the obscurer comers of the pub. Copies of antique books and magazines frequently change hands
at astronomical prices, and on almost any Wednesday at least three well-known dealers may be seen smoking large cigars as they lean over the bar, swapping stories with Drew. From time to time a vast guffaw announces the denouement of some anecdote and provokes a flood of anxious inquiries from patrons who are afraid they may have missed something. But, alas, delicacy forbids that I should repeat any of these interesting tales here. Unlike most things in this island, they are not for export . . . .
Luckily, no such restrictions apply to the tales of Mr. Harry Purvis, B.Sc. (at least), Ph.D. (probably), F.R.S. (personally I don’t think so, though it has been rumored). None of them would bring a blush to the cheeks of the most delicately nurtured maiden aunts, should any still survive in these days.
I must apologize. This is too sweeping a statement. There was one story which might, in some circles, be regarded as a little daring. Yet I do not hesitate to repeat it, for I know that you, dear reader, will be sufficiently broad-minded to take no offense.
It started in this fashion. A celebrated Fleet Street reviewer had been pinned into a corner by a persuasive publisher, who was about to bring out a book of which he had high hopes. It was one of the riper productions the “and-then-the-house-gave-another-lurch-as-the-termites-finished-the-east-wing” school of fiction. Eire had already banned it, but that is an honor which few books escape nowadays, and certainly could not be considered a distinction. However, if a leading British newspaper could be induced to make a stem call for its suppression, it would become a best-seller overnight . . . .
Such was the logic of its publisher, and he was using all his wiles to induce cooperation. I heard him remark, apparently total any scruples his reviewer friend might have, “Of course not if they can understand it, they can’t be corrupted any further!” And then Harry Purvis, who has an uncanny knack of following half a dozen conversations simultaneously, so that he can insert himself in the right one at the right time, said in his peculiarly penetrating and noninterruptable voice: “Censorship does raise some very difficult problems, doesn’t it? I’ve always argued that there’s an inverse correlation between a country’s degree of civilization and the restraints it puts on its press.
A New England voice from the back of the room cut in: “On that argument, Paris is a more civilized place than Boston.” .
“Precisely,” answered Purvis. For once, he waited for a reply.
“O.K.” said the New England voice mildly. “I’m not arguing. I just wanted to check.”
“To continue,” said Purvis, wasting no more time in doing so, “I’m reminded of a matter which has not yet concerned the censor, but which will certainly do so before long. It began in France, and so far has remained there. When it does come out into the open, it may have a greater impact on our civilization than the atom bomb.
“Like the atom bomb, it arose out of equally academic research. Never, gentlemen, underestimate science. I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.
“You will appreciate that the story I am telling you is, for once in a while, secondhand. I got it from a colleague at the Sorbonne last year while I was over there at a scientific conference. So the names are all fictitious: I was told them at the time, but I can’t remember them now.
“Professor-ah-Julian was an experimental physiologist at one of the smaller, but less impecunious, French universities. Some of you may remember that rather unlikely tale we heard here the other week from that fellow Hinckelberg, about his colleague who’d learned how to control the behavior of animals through feeding the correct currents into their nervous systems. Well, if there was any truth in that story and frankly I doubt it-the whole project was probably inspired by Julian’s papers in Comptes Rendus.
“Professor Julian, however, never published his most remarkable results. When you stumble on something which is really terrific, you don’t rush into print. You wait until you have overwhelming evidence-unless you’re afraid that someone else is hot on the track. Then you may issue an ambiguous report that will establish your priority at a later date, without giving too much away at the moment-like the famous cryptogram that Huygens put out when he detected the rings of Saturn.
“You may well wonder what Julian’s discovery was, so I won’t keep you in suspense. It was simply the natural extension of what man has been doing for the last hundred years. First the camera gave us the power to capture scenes. Then Edison invented the phonograph, and sound was mastered. Today, in the talking film, we have a kind of mechanical memory which would be inconceivable to our forefathers.
But surely the matter cannot rest there. Eventually science must be able to catch and store thoughts and sensations themselves, and feed them back into the mind so that, whenever it wishes, it can repeat any experience in life, down to its minutest detail.”
” That’s an old idea!” snorted someone. “See the ‘feelies’ in Brave New World.”
“All good ideas have been thought of by somebody before they are realized,” said Purvis severely. “The point is that what Huxley and others had talked about, Julian actually did. My goodness, there’s a pun there! Aldous-Julian-oh, let it pass!
“It was done electronically, of course. You all know how the encephalograph can record the minute electrical impulses in the living brain-the so-called ‘brain waves,’ as the popular press calls them. Julian’s device was a much subtler elaboration of this well-known instrument. And, having recorded cerebral impulses, he could play them back again. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? So. was the phonograph, but it took the genius of Edison to think of it.
“And now, enter the villain. Well, perhaps that’s too strong a word, for Professor Julian’s assistant Georges-Georges Dupin is really quite a sympathetic character. It was just that, being a Frenchman of a more practical turn of mind than the Professor, he saw at once that there were some milliards of francs involved in this laboratory toy.
“The first thing was to get it out of the laboratory. The French have an undoubted flair for elegant engineering, and after some weeks of work-with the full cooperation of the Professor-Georges had managed to pack the ‘playback’ side of the apparatus into a cabinet no larger than a television set, and containing not very many more parts.
“Then Georges was ready to make his first experiment. It would involve considerable expense, but as someone so rightly remarked you cannot make omelets-, without breaking eggs. And the analogy is, if I may say so, an exceedingly apt one.